Steve Gill saw God in the destruction of 9/11

Millions of people around the world watched the twin towers fall, but only New Yorkers lived through the full horror. From Staten Island to Ground Zero to Brooklyn, they witnessed an apocalyptic scene. The National Post’s Kathryn Blaze Carlson has returned with four onlookers to the very place where they watched the buildings collapse. How has their life changed in the past 10 years? Today, Steve Gill talks about the religious lessons learned from being at Ground Zero.

NEW YORK — As a young boy, Steve Gill lost his father to a sudden heart attack. As a man, he outlived an IRA bomb blast in Britain and survived violent San Francisco earthquakes.

He watched as his son’s fiancée was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just six months before the wedding, only to see that same son diagnosed with the same disease years later.

Mr. Gill, a Christian, said it was as if lightning struck the same spot twice.

“Life is full of challenges, and I’ve had my fill,” the 62-year-old businessman said on a recent September afternoon in Lower Manhattan. “But this … this was a big one.”

“This” was Sept. 11, 2001, when Mr. Gill ran for his life as the World Trade Center came under attack; when the married father of two dodged glass shards raining from the North Tower, when he caught his breath on the Westside Highway, looked up and saw the glistening silver underbelly of United Airlines Flight 175 soar 50 metres overhead and into the South Tower.

Like untold others, “this” was when Mr. Gill’s faith was tested. Why did God allow such death and destruction? Why did God cast such evil upon New York? Why did God spare him, but not thousands of innocent mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters?

“It’s an unanswerable question,” he said, as we sat together at a hotel sports bar along the Westside Highway, just south of Ground Zero. “I’ve almost given up on it.”

We had just finished retracing much of his Sept. 11 escape route along the highway to Battery Park, although we were forced to imagine much of it because of construction at the site.

When the terrorists struck, Mr. Gill was executive vice-president at Standard Chartered Bank and had just left his office in 7 World Trade Center for a breakfast meeting at the foot of the South Tower. Debris chased him and dozens others down to the southern tip of Manhattan, where he fled the Armageddon-like scene on a ferry bound for Staten Island.

Retracing his sprint from Ground Zero was a rare exercise for Mr. Gill, who said he is not much for looking back.

Still, he said he has learned lessons from that day, including a near-answer to the unanswerable question he almost gave up on.

“I saw that God is often most visible when things are most awful, whether it’s Christ on the Cross or the World Trade Center attack killing 3,000 people,” he said in the British accent that has survived his 27 years in America, first in California and now in Westchester, N.Y. “I don’t know why bad things happen. But I see that God is most present, perversely, when things are at their worst.”

He saw God in the friends — many from his Bible study group — who comforted his wife, Susan, when she feared the worst waiting for him to come home on Sept. 11. He saw God when the towers “melted like candles” rather than topple horizontally in a 110-storey path of destruction.

He saw God in St. Paul’s Chapel, which was relatively unscathed despite its proximity to the attack. He saw God in his employees who, “like something out of James Bond, covered in dust and carrying discs with secret passwords,” got his bank’s Jersey City emergency centre up-and-running within hours.

When he addressed his employees shortly after the attack, he read from the Bible. He said he chose Psalm 64 because it reflected his anger, but also his faith in God’s grace. “Hear me, my God, as I voice my complaint; protect my life from the threat of the enemy,” the passage says. “God will shoot them with his arrows; they will suddenly be struck down.”

Mr. Gill was raised in a Baptist family, but he did not come to the faith on his own until he was 16.

At the time, his mother, Mary, was a Bible smuggler. That summer, she and his Aunt Lizzie left on a surreptitious mission to “somewhere in the communist, secular former Soviet Union” and he was sent to a Christian camp in Anglesey, North Wales.

There, he met Dr. Helen Roosevere, a missionary who had just returned from a hospital in the Belgian Congo. She was a “light of faith,” and he has been a Christian ever since.

Sept. 11 was a similarly eventful moment in his religious life, he said, but not just because he came to terms with the reality of evil in this world.

He said he also learned to “have faith like a child.”

“Children live in the moment — they laugh when they’re joyful, they scream when they’re hurt, they give you a big hug when they love you,” he said, adding that he “studies” his four grandchildren these 10 years later. “There’s a lot of wisdom in having faith like a child, in living life knowing that you’re loved no matter what — even if you trip and fall or the World Trade Center crumbles.”

Mr. Gill, a guitarist who plays in a “rock and white man’s reggae band” that headlined several Sept. 11 fundraisers, said he is torn over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to exclude clergy and formal prayers from this year’s 10th anniversary. Yes, religion can be divisive, he said, but Sept. 11 was not about the polarization of faiths.

“Muslims were as outraged as Jews and Christians,” said Mr. Gill, who now runs his own consulting firm. “This was not about one particular religion — this was about a particular group with a particular view.”

On the anniversary this Sunday, Mr. Gill will attend a healing service at the Mamaroneck United Methodist Church, where the pastor will lay hands and anoint congregants with oil.

“Personally, I would just as soon have a regular mass — I’m not much of a looker backer,” he said, adding: “But we must never forget.”